A few months a ago heavy rains hit So Cal pretty hard. This hit my restaurant harder.
It was a busy Friday night, I was running around as usually until one of my tables asked me for Cholula. I went to grab a bottle from the side station and of course we were out. I rushed into the dry storage pantry to grab a few extra bottles when I felt a splatter across my forehead. I looked up ad saw a small crack in the ceiling. The roof was leaking pretty bad. The manager met me in the back and said it was fine and we removed the cracked ceiling tile and placed a bucket under the water leak. I thought to myself, "At least it was in the back right? Only the staff would have to deal with it." Our restaurant is pretty old and we didn't think much of it.
A few minutes later a second leak was reported in the men's restroom. I thought, "Alright bathroom ceiling leak, not too bad, at least it was in the men's room and not the ladies, men usually don't go into histarics over something like that and they don't use the restroom that much either."
Then it happened one of the greatest nights in my serving career, absolute chaos. Two woman sitting in my friends station came up to me an asked if they could move to another table, reason...........they felt a drip on their heads. I said sure no problem and escorted them to one of my empty tables. 30 seconds after they moved I looked up at the table they were sitting at and saw a massive wet mess yellow and brown in color and everywhere. My implusive thought was some spolied brat child had thrown up their overcooked chicken nuggets all over the booth because they wanted pizza instead. This was the usual occurrence but no, even better the entire roof above table 29 had caved it!! Water was pouring in, insulation was splattered in all directions and the greedy looks of those knowing this was the perfect opportuntiy for free food started popping up everywhere. After what felt like an hour of shock and frozen brain function I snapped back to reality and saw our manager rushing to the area of chaos to try and calm everyone down. Luckily no one was sitting at table 29. THANK GOD!! What restaurant can bounce back after their roof falls on top of someone? That would have been a law suit up the ass.
We did not close the restaurant after that. We kept working and occasionally changed a full bucket of water at table 29. We did however comp over $300 in food that night and paid for nearly $10,000 worth of roof repair the following week.
Restaurant life goes on.
